Schrödinger's Lurker

aaaaaand that was it for the suggestion box for today! 🫡

that was really fun! i got some reallllly good suggestions that i didn't get to 🥲 BUT i'll definitely do this again!

Advances in weaponry meant that, for the first time, men were coming home from war with literally half their faces blown off, on a regular basis. This was not only traumatic— there were cases of men cancelling engagements or being afraid to see their families, because of their disfigurements— but also caused problems with every day tasks like speaking and eating, in which your face plays a pretty key role.

Gillies arranged for a whole ward, and later a hospital, to be dedicated to the treatment of these men, and took steps to ensure that all soldiers who received these kinds of injuries on the battlefield would be sent to him directly. He developed methods for applying skin grafts so that larger portions of the face could be repaired.

He continued his work treating wounded soldiers throughout WW1 and WW2, and when both wars were ended— just in case he hadn't done enough to establish himself as a full on hero— he was then approached by a medical student named Michael Dillon, a trans man, and was able to use the same techniques he'd developed to reconstruct the penises of wounded soldiers to give him a phalloplasty. The first one ever performed on a trans man. He even diagnosed the guy with a condition to explain the frequent operations, so as to avoid outing him.

Dillon later wrote a book about trans-ness, which inspired Roberta Cowell, who became the first British transwoman to get a vaginoplasty, also performed by Gillies.

϶—T÷h÷a÷t÷s÷A÷G÷o÷o—d—P o

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The reason according to the college is that they want to sell the building to fix the school's budget; they also claim the wood tech college has a severe budget deficit, but they've failed to follow through on any promises to try to fix that (including hiring a permanent dean, so the school has someone to advocate for them... which they haven't had in at least a decade).

The reason according to some students & staff is that Seattle College's VP has a grudge against the lead carpentry instructor & has been trying to get her program shut down for years to get rid of her.

Students are trying to make some noise about it, in hopes that the college backs down and they can work towards the long-term fixes Seattle College keeps failing to follow through on.

If you can sign this little petition & share this around, it'd help the school out a ton!

It shows the school they're going to get pushback, which has changed their mind about this in the past.

It would be really cool if we could help get this to 1k!

There are less than 200 students at the wood tech college, so makes a really big impact when anyone else signs and shows that people outside of just students really care about this.

Residential building, by Julio Lafuente and Gaetano Rebecchini (1977).

Rome, Italy.

© Roberto Conte (2024)